People

Competent. Experienced. Authentic.

Our team at smartshiftwork.com consists of dedicated and experienced fatigue experts that have worked with Kristjof Tritschler over several years or have experience concerning fatigue risk management with scientific bodies.

Kristjof Tritschler, director of smartshiftwork.com, is a recognised safety expert specialised in Fatigue Risk Management Systems. His background includes over ten years of actual fatigue- and safety-management experience and more than twenty years of flying experience as an airline pilot. He is a facilitator dedicated to simple, practicable and effective solutions. He holds an academic degree of a MSc in Air Safety Management. He is a certified accident investigator and aviation auditor.

Simple. Practicable. Effective.

As one of the FRMS pioneers in Europe, Kristjof Tritschler has been inspired independently by Simon Stewart and by Drew Dawson to combine operational experience and scientific knowledge in an operational context. This was achieved with the SMS framework during 2006. At that point of time, fatigue was a rather unknown term in Europe, guidance material was rare and limited tools were available. Therefore, innovations were needed in order to make FRMS applicable, by the development and application of simple, practicable and effective solutions. The interesting about what has been developed during this period of time was “what is needed to manage fatigue risk effectively from an organisational perspective”, which differs very much from today’s standpoint to “apply what an organisation has to do to achieve compliance and approval”.
The result has been a performance driven and successful FRMS, which has been compliant in most parts with the ICAO FRMS framework, as published by ICAO 5 years later, in 2011. It was an easy task to achieve full compliance of a performance driven FRMS. On the other hand, it might be a challenge to achieve real performance improvements with a compliance based FRMS.
Encouraged by Jim Mengie (Delta), Philippa Gander, Michelle Millar (ICAO), Daniel Coutelier (EASA) and Kathryn Jones (CAA), Kristjof Tritschler continued to facilitate and improve FRMS processes and strategies.

In total the gained experiences over 10 years of operational fatigue risk management was very demanding, full of questions, resistance, failures, improvements, traps, back falls but of success as well.

Career Progression:

Member of the EASA Scientific Committee of FTL study: 2017

Launch of smartshiftwork.com January: 2016

Manager Fatigue Risk Management System (FRMS) Germanwings: 2006-2016

Flight Safety Manager Germanwings: 2004-2010

Active Airline Pilot in regional, short-haul and long-haul operations: since 1994 up to date